How Trump could make US a climate pariah over Paris pact

( CNN) Reports have itthat President Donald Trump will assemble his advisers on Tuesday to decide on whether to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Naturally, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, a career-long, oil-industry shill from Oklahoma, is arguing to pull out.

Yet even Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, is arguing to stay. If Trump goes with Pruitt instead of Tillerson, he will instantly create a worldwide consensus on climate action: to fight the American recklessness that Pruitt epitomizes.

I happened to have been in the White House( discussing solutions to the AIDS epidemic) the working day in early 2001 that George W. Bush Jr. pulled the US out of the Kyoto Protocol to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The move was a predictable catastrophe: it delayed effective global action on global warming for another 15 years. Yet Bush use an controversy then that is utterly closed off today.